Midnight to the North: The Untold Story of the Inuit Woman
who Saved the Polaris Expedition

By Sheila Nickerson

New York: Jeffrey P. Tarcher / Putnam, 2002

Reviewed by Kenn Harper

Sheila Nickerson has written a brief biography of Tookoolito,
or Hannah, interpreter and assistant to Charles Francis Hall from
his third month in the Arctic in 1860 until his mysterious death
in northern Greenland 11 years later. Under the tutelage of
Tookoolito and her husband, Ebierbing, Hall became one of the
first Arctic explorers to adopt the clothing and travel methods
of the Inuit, thereby enhancing his possibility of success. Midnight
to the North provides accurately the essentials of
Hannah’s short and eventful life. But the author’s
focus is clearly on Hall’s third expedition. The first 32 of
Hannah’s 38 years are dealt with in the first two chapters,
pages 1 to 37, almost a page per year. The rest of the book is
devoted to the Polaris Expedition and, in particular, to the
experiences of nineteen people who were separated from the ship
and drifted southward on an ice floe. That drift, for six months
over a distance of approximately 1,200 miles, is the most amazing
tale of perseverance in the copious literature of Arctic survival
stories.

Midnight to the North is the third book on the Polaris
expedition to appear in fifteen months. Nickerson takes her title
from a poem by Emily Dickenson. But it is the sub-title that is
troubling. To portray the life of Tookoolito as "The Untold
Story of the Inuit Woman Who Saved the Polaris Expedition"
is simply dishonest. For starters, Tookoolito was obviously with
only one of the two groups of survivors, the group on the
icefloe. The focus of this book is on that party. And within that
group, no one person can be given credit for having saved the
party. If credit had to be given to one, and only one, person, it
would have to go to Ebierbing, known to white men as Joe, the
more competent of the two Inuit hunters who kept the expedition
supplied with food on their epic drift. A more honest appraisal
would have to apportion the credit three ways – to Joe, to
George Tyson, the American who organized and co-ordinated
activities on the icefloe, and to Hannah.

But Nickerson doesn’t like Ebierbing much. She makes her
intentions clear at the outset when she states: "I wanted to
find and bring to the surface women of the Arctic whose
extraordinary lives had been ignored, glossed over, historically
cast aside – while the men they assisted ran away with the
fame" (page 4). In order to tell "how the indigenous
people made the white man’s adventure possible" (page
6) – surely a worthwhile objective – and focus on
Tookoolito, she has to sideline Ebierbing. Indeed,
Nickerson’s treatment of Ebierbing can only be understood if
one assumes Tokoolito to be a metaphor for the married couple,
the partnership of Tookoolito and Ebierbing; only in that context
can this statement be understood: "She had led the dogs and
pulled the sledges, fished and hunted, cooked and sewed, found
food when none was available, kept the lamp burning…, made
conversation between tribes possible, and helped re-create the
story of the lost Franklin expedition" (page 7). Or this,
grudgingly: "Their combined dedication to practical needs
and moral principles created a powerful, cohesive energy that
would be critical to the salvation of all the ice floe
prisoners." (page 64).

Most scholars lay the blame for Hall’s death by poisoning
on Emil Bessels, scientist. But Nickerson has a different view.
"My suspicions lean toward Budington," she says (page
49). His motives, she claims, were "seated in much deeper,
more complex emotional depths… fed by alcohol" (page
49). Indeed, she downplays the many faults of Hall, while making
much of Budington’s. On the subject of the exploitation of
Tookoolito, Ebierbing and their baby, Tukeliketa, for promotional
purposes, she elegantly states that "the line between
promotion for positive purposes and exploitation was as thin as
young ice" (page 28). Nickerson mentions Budington’s
earlier falling out with Hall, in June 1863, when Hall learned
that Budington planned to leave on a whaling voyage to Baffin
Island and planned to take Tookoolito and Ebierbing with him and
return them home. What she doesn’t mention is
Budington’s motivation – sympathy for the Inuit and
concern over their deteriorating health even while Hall continued
to exhibit them. The death of Tukeliketa in February of 1863 can
be laid squarely at the feet of Hall. Yet she claims that
Budington was a "danger" and that "he and Hall
were now locked in a jealous combat that would prove more deadly
than Hall could have imagined." (page 32)

Nickerson performs another indignity to the memory of Sidney
O. Budington when she talks about the burials of Inuit in Starr
Cemetery in Groton. Budington occasionally took Inuit to Groton
to winter with him and his family. Most survived to return north,
but those few who died in Groton were buried there by Budington.
Some of the grave markers even commemorate the lives of Inuit not
buried there, but who died on board ship in Budington’s care
on the way back north. There is no "small enclosure of Inuit
graves" (page 6) in Starr Cemetery, as Nickerson claims,
although there is a small group of Inuit graves. She claims that
the Inuit dead were not welcomed into the Budington family plot
and that, instead, they are "nowhere near the Captain."
(page 164). This is not true. The Inuit dead, including Hannah,
Tukeliketa and Punna, are not far from Budington’s own
grave.

Punna’s headstone is particularly touching. The story of
her life on the Polaris icefloe is chiseled in tiny letters into
the grave marker. It ends with a line which Nickerson records
thus: "I could not get the final piece. It seemed to be,
‘Of such is the kingdom of love.’ I wanted it to be
‘love,’ not ‘heaven’… I did rubbing
after rubbing, but the word – the final word – is
nearly gone… I returned later in the day for another attempt
but still could not resolve it." (page 163) In her chapter
notes, she reveals that Nourse’s 1879 book gives the word as
"heaven." This may be a dramatic device to show
Nickerson’s empathy for the young girl buried there, but it
is dishonest. I’ve visited this grave many times. The word
is clearly "heaven."

I have the usual quibbles over details and accuracy. Hall did
not die "soon after the expedition got under way" (page
2) but rather on November 8, 1871, over four months after the
ship left Brooklyn Navy Yard. The same page refers to
Blake’s book, Arctic Experiences, which focuses on
Tyson, as existing "only in a small number of libraries and
on microfiche," whereas it is well-known and often offered
in the catalogues of book dealers specializing in Arctic
literature – a recent check on the Internet site, Advanced
Book Exchange, found seven copies offered. After two references
to Hall having met Tookoolito in Cumberland Sound in 1860 (page 3
and 16), the author contradicts herself on page 18 when she has
the vessel south of Cumberland Sound at Cyrus Field Bay at the
mouth of Frobisher Bay where it wintered and where Hall’s
first meeting with the Inuit took place. The names of Captain
Sidney O. Budington and his uncle James Buddington are both
spelled as Budington throughout, although James always spelled
his surname with two "d"s. There is no proof that
Tookoolito and Ebierbing were ever married in England, let alone
in John Bowlby’s house (pages 15 and 64).

There are a number of instances of geographical ignorance. The
icefloe party is said to be drifting down "the coast of
Labrador (now called Newfoundland)" (page 119) and later is
said to be "in the lower part of the Labrador Sea, halfway
down the Newfoundland coast" (page 127). Labrador and
Newfoundland are geographically distinct parts of the province of
"Newfoundland and Labrador", and the icefloe was off
the coast of Labrador. On page 168, she has Niantilik at the
mouth of Cumberland Sound instead of well up the south-west coast
of the sound. The statement that the Polaris story now attracts
particular interest because "the geographical area of the
Polaris ice drift story… is almost entirely within the
bounds of the newly created… Inuit province of Nunavut"
(page 8) is completely ludicrous. This story takes place almost
entirely at sea, on an ice floe; the only parts of the Polaris
story to take place on land happen in northern Greenland, in
Newfoundland when the icefloe party is finally rescued, and in
the United States. No part of the Polaris story takes place in
the territory (not province) of Nunavut, except for the rescue
vessel Tigress putting in briefly at Cumberland Sound. She
describes the taking of a bearded seal and notes that "if
not for the seal, they would have soon been in darkness."
Hardly. They were close to the Arctic Circle, it was March 2,
they were drifting south and the days were lengthening. On page
64 is the perplexing statement that the sun was seven feet above
the horizon (Oct 26).

Similarly, Nickerson is weak on matters of Inuktitut language.
On page 23, she talks about the birth of Tookoolito’s first
child, Tukeliketa, whom she called "Johny" and notes
that Hall called him "Little Butterfly;" perhaps it
should have been noted that Hall’s reason for calling him
that is because the name means "butterfly." On page 36,
the name of the adopted daughter, Punna, is said to mean
"little child"; in fact it is Hall’s mis-spelling
of the Inuktitut word "panik" which means
"daughter". On page 66, there is no etymological
relationship between the word "igloo" (iglu) for
"dwelling" and "agloo" (aglu), the
seal’s birthing lair above the ice.

Suddenly, on page 81, having made a cameo appearance earlier
in the book, Nickerson’s aging mother inexplicably becomes
part of the story. The woman is dying, and Nickerson balances her
time between visits to her mother and her research into
Tookoolito’s life. The many attempts to draw a link between
Tookoolito and Nickerson’s mother detracts from this work.
In an earlier book, Disappearance: A Map, Nickerson
successfully wove a beautiful mosaic of the stories of Arctic
explorers and her own personal experiences in her Alaskan home.
In that book, it worked wonderfully well. Here, it doesn’t.
The comparisons are inapt, and Nickerson’s mother is a sad
distraction. Similarly, there is no reason for the reader to
learn that Nickerson once edited a 1,000-page book on
astrophysics and rafted down the Colorado River with her husband.
I’m troubled, too, at the admissions of hurried research. Of
a visit to the Smithsonian Institution, she writes: "I was
in a hurry. I was also tired, after flying all night. I had
one-and-a-half days to find what I was looking for" (page
99), and "I was running out of time. Could I find it? Would
I fail?" (page 100). Nickerson’s writing is often
beautiful, as one would expect from a former poet laureate of
Alaska, but this would have been a much better, if shorter, book
without the mother and the research anecdotes.